… and has committed to sharing its archives of public photographsonline. The New York Public Library along with The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, and others have joined Flickr Commons, a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo collections of the world’s leading cultural heritage institutions.

We expect to learn a lot from Flickr users and are thrilled at the exposure that this project will give to our photographic collections. We also see the Flickr Commons as a sort of training ground for our staff — a place to get some serious hands-on experience collaborating with users in a vibrant social Web community. Down the road, we expect to implement similar tools and features on our own site, say, for example, in the Digital Gallery.

… and will never be overlooked or allowed EVER again. Time to wake up NY Post, we no longer live with blind folds on. Bad taste is bad taste.

THIS CARTOON IS A PROBLEM – Chris Matthews

Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said the Post showed a “serious lapse in judgment” by running the cartoon. “To think that the cartoonist and the responsible editors at the paper did not see the racist overtones of the finished product should insult their intelligence,” Ciara said in a written statement. “Instead, they celebrate their own lack of perspective and criticize those who call it what it is: tone deaf at best, overtly racist at worst.”

In California, civil rights leader Earl Ofari Hutchinson called on the Post to apologize. “In times past, that depiction of African-Americans has been vigorously condemned as racially offensive,” Hutchinson said in a statement issued from his Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. “The cartoon also subtly condones violence. We call on the Post management to issue an immediate apology and a statement that racial insults will not be tolerated by Post writers and cartoonists.”

At first glance, few American cities would seem to be more obviously threatened by the crash than New York. The city shed almost 17,000 jobs in the financial industry alone from October 2007 to October 2008, and Wall Street as we’ve known it has ceased to exist.

“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008. As a result of the crisis, “the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire—the fall long prophesied by Paul Kennedy and others.